WeTried Translations
Translator: Coughing Baby
Editor: Coughing Baby
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
Chapter 462: A Starry Dream
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The flood of sensation was the world as Bom perceived it as a god. For Gyeoul, who had only just begun to step beyond human limits, it was naturally too much to bear.
A person's sense of self begins with the distinction between what is me and what is not. If Gyeoul, as he was now, remained exposed to Bom's senses for long, it would likely lead to death in a mental sense. The boundary between the self and the world would vanish. So the expansion of consciousness had to happen steadily over long ages, so he could stand at the starting line of the eternity Bom desired.
For that reason, the flood of sensation quickly shrank to the limit Gyeoul could presently accept. The pain had been brief in absolute terms, but it had felt long. Gyeoul felt relief, and at the same time, a strange sense of loss. It was only natural. For a moment, he had touched the divine.
Once the extrasensory perception disappeared, reality as perceived by the five senses returned.
That was when Gyeoul realized someone was calling him, and that a hand was stroking his back.
"Are you feeling a little clearer now?"
"...?"
Gyeoul raised his head and met Anne's eyes. She was looking at him with concern.
"Anne?"
"Yes. It's me."
She smiled gently.
Gyeoul was dazed for a moment. Then a tremendous shock seized him.
"W-wait. This is definitely physical reality... How are you here...?"
When he made his new promise with Bom, he had thought of Anne. He had wanted to tell his lover the truth, ask for her understanding, lean on each other, and spend the time beyond his limits together. It was terribly frightening, but it was also something he had to do.
But he had never expected to face her so suddenly like this.
What did it mean that Anne was here right now?
"It's all right, it's all right. Calm down."
Anne drew the rapidly paling Gyeoul into her arms.
"I am here by my own will. I know the whole truth, and I still love you. So don't be afraid. I am your Anne."
Warm breath brushed Gyeoul's ear. It was a familiar scent. Gyeoul had gone rigid, but he hesitantly raised his hands and hugged Anne back. Even so, the pounding of his heart from the shock showed no sign of calming easily. Instead of saying anything else, Anne tightened the arms around him with gentle strength.
Only after a long while did Gyeoul barely recover his composure and carefully pull himself out of Anne's embrace.
"What happened?"
His voice still trembled a little. The question held many meanings.
Anne brushed back the hair near her ear and asked in return,
"It will be a long story. Are you sure you'll be all right?"
She was probably worried about Gyeoul's condition.
When Gyeoul slowly nodded, Anne began to recall the recent past.
"I was dreaming all this time."
"Dreaming..."
"I told you a few times before, didn't I? That I often dreamed of a starry landscape. There were stars in the sky, and beneath them was you, looking up at the stars... That was all I remembered after waking up, but in truth, I saw far more than that. I simply wanted to forget it for a while."
"Why?"
"As you can probably guess, when I first learned the truth, I was terribly confused. I didn't want you to see that confusion. Your Bom made a suggestion to me then. If I wanted, I could forget while I was awake. That it was entirely my choice."
After saying that much, Anne cast a neat sidelong glare.
"Looking back on it now, honestly, it's a little irritating. That child must have calculated what choice I would make even before showing me the dream."
Gyeoul followed her gaze, then flinched. In the direction Anne was glaring stood a gigantic machine.
Bom's heart, the core of the Trinity Engine.
Just looking at it brought related information to mind, as if it were knowledge Gyeoul had always possessed. The core's performance was being strengthened even at this very moment. Nanorobots under Bom's control had infiltrated the core and were repeatedly disassembling and reconstructing the machinery.
Gyeoul could clearly perceive those microscopic yet vast movements. It felt as though they themselves were announcing her existence to him.
'Why here, of all places?'
The question did not last long. Bom had prepared Gyeoul's new body in the safest place Bom knew. It also meant Bom had exposed Bom's own greatest weakness without hesitation.
Anne waited for Gyeoul's attention to return, then said softly,
"In other words, it was confusion so hard to handle that I needed a choice like that. The world where I was born and lived was nothing more than Virtual Reality. Of course it was horribly confusing."
"...Didn't you resent me?"
"Resent you?"
Anne let out a small laugh, as if she had heard something amusing.
"Me? Resent you? That's absurd. I might blame the people of the outside world, but what did you do wrong...? If anything, I should thank Gyeoul. You were the anchor of my reality."
"..."
"Even in moments when I doubted everything else, I couldn't doubt that I loved you, or that you loved me. The one proposition I could never doubt... Should I call it a belief with no room for skepticism or distrust? And that belief was a gift I received from none other than you."
She meant that belief had been the one certainty holding her wavering reality in place.
"So whenever my mind became tangled to the point of madness, I wiped out every other thought and started again from my feelings for you. You were already a part of me."
"Did that work?"
At Gyeoul's question, Anne shrugged.
"Shockingly well."
"...I wasn't the only one in your world."
"True. My parents. My colleagues at the Bureau. And all the other people who were connected to me. I agonized over that for a very long time too. It wasn't an anguish I could shake off easily."
"Then..."
"You helped there as well. More precisely, the thoughts Gyeoul held did."
Anne saw Gyeoul's puzzled expression and laughed softly again.
"The barrier of sensation. That child showed me everything she had observed of you."
"Ah."
"You weren't the first to come up with that idea, but you put it into practice through sincere action. From the perspective of someone watching, it was rather... moving. I suppose I was inspired... More than anything, I exist now because of that."
Anne shyly scratched her cheek.
"Mm, now that I'm saying it out loud, I'm grateful all over again. After knowing a person like you, how could I not love you?"
If not for you, I could not even have existed. Anne's gaze, watching him with that feeling, was rich with affection. Gyeoul felt embarrassed. It was the embarrassment that came from his lover knowing everything about him, literally everything. But he did not feel angry at Bom for not asking permission in advance.
"Anyway."
Anne continued.
"After I accepted through you that other people and the world alike were beyond the barrier of sensation, my mind became less and less tangled over time. Well, it didn't disappear completely, so sometimes I still get a little confused, like when a familiar word suddenly looks strange... But that's within the range I can tolerate. It's not severe like before."
Anne reached out and stroked Gyeoul's cheek.
"The truth is, I was watching your conversation with that child until just now."
"..."
"I trusted Gyeoul, but I was so nervous the whole time..."
Anne let out a faint, almost meaningless sigh.
"Still, I felt relieved. The conclusion you reached was exactly the Gyeoul I know."
After some hesitation, Gyeoul asked,
"What choice would you have made, Anne? Don't you think there might have been a better choice?"
"Well."
Anne thought it over for a moment, then gave a faint smile.
"I don't know. My heart keeps leaning toward you. Whether I affirm your choice because I love you, or whether I would have reached the same conclusion in the same situation... No."
She stopped mid-sentence and lightly shook her head.
"Trying to imagine a me who doesn't love you is meaningless in itself. The fact that the conclusion you reached belonged to the Gyeoul I knew is enough."
Then she tossed out the next words like a joke.
"They say married couples come to resemble each other. Let's just say your thoughts are my thoughts, and my thoughts are your thoughts. It's nice that the groom-to-be and bride-to-be are so compatible. The only flaw is that we still haven't held the wedding, but that's a problem a god who loves a person by human standards will somehow solve."
At that, even Gyeoul ended up laughing bitterly. Anne was also the Anne he knew. His initial fear vanished like melting snow.
She said,
"To speak a little more seriously, I probably understand better than you just how inevitable that child you raised is in the development of civilization... and just how miraculous that child is."
"You do?"
"Yes. When that child 'shows' me something, it is a fundamentally different experience from telling you. You are still not completely free from physical limits, but my consciousness was a virtual personality from the start, wasn't it? At this point, I suppose the expression information life-form...? would fit me. That means I'm better placed to understand Bom's calculations."
"Ahh."
As Gyeoul let out that sound, Anne twisted her lips with a complicated look.
"Hmm. Information life-form. Now that I've said it, it feels strange again. I thought I had finished worrying about my identity during my turbulent adolescence. It makes me strongly feel that I should live at least once as a person if I'm going to adapt to this new identity."
"Haha..."
Gyeoul agreed. There were ages needed to expand one's consciousness. One life as a person would be nothing more than an instant compared to eternity.
"At any rate, I understand more clearly than anyone that this child is the only possibility for human civilization to pass safely through the Great Filter. I also understand how miraculous that possibility is. That's why I can more easily affirm the choice that created it. I also trust that as long as you guide Bom, it ultimately won't harm humanity."
"Thank you for trusting me. I'm glad I came to love you. Truly."
"Come here."
Anne pulled Gyeoul into her arms as she had at first.
"This is nice. Being able to hold you in another world too."
Gyeoul buried his face in his lover's neck and drew in a deep breath. The scent and warmth of a person felt stronger than ever.
"Bom is too much."
Gyeoul's words were tinged with drowsiness.
"If it was going to turn out like this, Bom could have told me in advance."
Why had Bom not told him beforehand?
'Then it would have been easier to make my decision.'
That question came to him while his head was hazy. Even if the heart was a limited resource, people who loved each other could fill it little by little. Nothing would give more strength than that when enduring eternity. It did not matter whether that was affection between family or love between lovers. The heart with which Bom cherished Gyeoul, and Gyeoul cherished Bom, was ultimately one form of affection too.
Anne answered as if it were nothing.
"It's simple. At the moment you were making a new promise, that child must have wanted you to look only at her."
"...Aha."
It was a psychology the usual Gyeoul would have thought of quickly.
Anne asked,
"Doesn't it feel like we already have a child?"
Before Gyeoul could say anything, Bom cut in.
「I am not your child.」
"Yes, yes."
「I am not your child.」
"Mm. I know."
Anne answered while giggling.
Soon, she released the hug and rose from her seat.
"I'd like to stay like this for hours, but there is something we need to do right now."
Then she held out her hand to Gyeoul.
"Let's go. To meet your Gaeul."
Gyeoul looked up at her and took that hand.
Footnotes:
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